


The Same Age

by pauraque



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Aging, Character Study, Community: hp_goldenage, Divorced Hermione Granger & Ron Weasley, Family, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Identity, Older Characters, Parenthood, Philosophy, Professor Hermione Granger, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:09:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29696904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pauraque/pseuds/pauraque
Summary: One week in winter, three old friends, and the things you think about when looking back over a long life.
Relationships: Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley, Ron Weasley & Rose Weasley
Comments: 18
Kudos: 19
Collections: Salt and Pepper Fest 2021





	The Same Age

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kelly_chambliss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelly_chambliss/gifts).



> Thank you to sdk for beta reading, to kelly_chambliss for the prompt, and to sdk and torino10154 for modding the fest! (Prompt C16: OMG! Now I'm as old as [X] was when they. . .)

1.

As she's about to head to class, Hermione is startled by the glimpse of a silver-maned witch with crooked spectacles in her bedroom mirror. She stops to straighten her glasses on her nose, and breathes a chuckle at herself, wondering how many times she will be brought up short by the thought: _Oh, right— I'm old!_

"You're only as old as you feel," the mirror pipes up cheerily, apparently having learnt, in its mindless way, what its mistress is likely to be thinking. Platitudes are all it can manage, not being truly alive or able to think for itself. Nonetheless, before she leaves her quarters, Hermione gives the mirror a smile and an affectionate pat on its bronze frame, burnished smooth and dark with decades of wear.

Walking the corridor to her classroom, she is mindful of the particular clunks and echoes of the Hogwarts floorboards beneath her feet, revelling in how well she knows them. It's begun to snow again outside; the great, tall windows that line the walls are like animated winter tapestries, framing scenes of fluffy flakes wafting gently down. The soft, grey light shines in ripples through the historically imperfect glass, flickering across Hermione's vision as she moves. It is so intensely nostalgic that she feels she might blink and find herself eleven years old again, awakening from a very long and curious daydream.

Of course, she knows the school's impression of eternal sameness is illusory. Over the centuries it has been updated, repaired, remodelled... Hermione recalls the Ship of Theseus, which had every single part replaced one by one, leaving the Greeks to ponder whether it really was the same ship any longer by the end.

Science tells her that she, too, is the Ship of Theseus, that none of the cells in her body are the same ones she was born with. But even that is less disconcerting than the thought that nothing in her _mind_ is the same as what it used to be either— that every childish understanding has been replaced again and again by nuance, wisdom, broadmindedness, specificity. Is there a single belief or relationship she's ever had that has never changed?

At times the change has felt tangible, like the tingling glow of magic. Like standing before her first students and feeling herself stretching and growing by leaps and bounds with every class. Like the sense of physically sliding into the rightness of being Ron's friend again, and not his wife. Like the first time she touched another woman's body, her palm sliding down a breast, a belly— transfiguring every nerve ending in her skin, shedding who she thought she was, rewriting all she once thought was true.

As she arrives in her classroom and sits down to arrange her notes for her final Transfiguration lesson of the term, she thinks of Minerva sitting just here and doing the same, and is briefly distracted by trying to calculate how much older she is now than Minerva was then. She doesn't feel anything like as venerable and intimidating as Minerva looked to her through a child's eyes, when even sixth-years looked impressively grown up.

Her sixth year class gradually files in now, chattering away to each other, full of the restless energy of the last day of school before a holiday. Not unlike being startled by her own well-lined face in the mirror, Hermione is surprised anew by how _unfinished_ her students look to her: some still baby-faced, some now awkward and gangly as hours-old horses.

"I know you're all eager to get away, so we won't work on anything too technical today," she begins, pretending not to notice some sceptical quirks of the eyebrow shared among the children. "But I would like to have a discussion about what to expect next term, and perhaps to give you something interesting to mull over while you're away." She taps the blackboard with her wand, and the words _human transfiguration_ appear in a large script much like her own.

She turns back to the classroom, gazes out over her students, takes a centering breath, and asks them:

"What is the self?"

In the ensuing silence, a smile wrinkles at the thin skin around Hermione's mouth. But she is not smiling at the wide-eyed stares that meet her, funny as they are—some blank, some half-panicked that they will be called on.

Hermione is smiling because she has lived long enough to ask this question, so juicy, so tantalising to the mind. That she's no longer the child who sat at one of those desks and would already have shot her hand up in the air in urgent need to parrot back some answer she'd read. That she's taken apart all the pieces of that child and replaced them with ones that don't fit together with such desperate, crushing tightness.

What makes Hermione smile, as she draws breath to begin guiding her students towards truly considering the question, is that she doesn't think she knows all the answers anymore.

2.

"Are you ready to go yet, Dad?" drifts Rose's voice across the house. "They'll all be waiting for us."

"Don't worry, I'm getting there," Ron calls back to her. Hat, gloves, winter coat—they each fold themselves compactly into his bag under the wave of his wand. Their movements are a little slower and more deliberate than they used to be, echoing the way his own body has slowed down over the past few years.

Having Rose here reminds him that he wanted to bring the old chess set. He gets it down from the cupboard and cradles the familiar shape of the worn chessmen's box in his equally worn hands. He opens it, ostensibly to check whether they're all still in there, snoring away, but really because he wants to hear the particular gentle click of the wood as the box shuts again.

That sound brings memories as vivid as diving into a Pensieve: Those in-between years when the kids had grown out of tantrums, naps, blink-long attention spans, and the need to be stopped from lighting themselves on fire... Not old enough for Hogwarts yet, but old enough to start to be really good company. Old enough to have real conversations with. Old enough for chess.

Ron remembers Hugo reading on the sofa, occasionally leaning off it, hanging upside down as he pointed out a funny picture or a word he needed help sounding out. He remembers Rose's serious face, nine or ten years old, chewing on her finger as she peered down at the chessboard on the coffee table between them. He remembers how the two of them would inevitably fall down pleasant rabbit-holes of hypothetical strategising ( _what if White went here? and then if Black set up a fork with the bishop here?_ ) until neither of them knew or cared anymore who won.

Those were the days when Ron first knew what _quiet_ was. Peaceable companionship, without other people always thundering up and down the stairs, calling, talking, rushing, mumbling, banging pots and pans about. Being able to hear his own breath. To hear the brush of the pages turning under Hugo's hands. To hear the felted bases of the chessmen bumping softly into place.

Hermione had talked of being lonely as an only child, so early on, they'd agreed on having two. It was the right decision. Two was good—two parents, two kids. Nobody outnumbered. Nobody having to shout to be heard. Nobody getting lost in the crowd.

"Dad?"

He turns; Rose is in the doorway, carrying her coat and her bags and her slight edge of anxiety over getting places on time.

"I was just getting the chess set," he says, holding it up to show her. "I thought when we got there we could have a few games."

Her brows un-knit themselves and a delighted smile spreads over her face, like blue breaking through winter clouds. "Oh, I'd like that! But no need to cart the set around—I'm actually giving a new one to Olivia for Christmas. It's all wrapped up with the other presents in the car."

"That'll work, then," he concedes, sliding the box and the board back onto the shelf and feeling a glow of pride that has his chest near bursting. He can't wait to see his granddaughter play.

Rose helps him load the last of his things into the car, and they take off into the snowy sky. Watching his daughter drive so confidently, her gloved hands manipulating magic and machine as if there's nothing to it, Ron can't help think of his own father, who worked so hard to make this legal. That's what he was still doing when he was the same age Ron is now.

Ron loved his father. But Arthur never had with him what he had with Rose and Hugo. Quiet afternoons of sounding out words together, of shared strategising over the chessboard... Nor the later days those afternoons led to, like when Rose first told him she wanted kids but didn't want to marry a man, and when Hugo first confided that he sometimes felt a dark and motiveless sadness that even chocolate couldn't shift.

They went to Ron with those things just as they had done when they scraped their knees as toddlers—because they trusted him to help. Realising that was a bit of a shock, and he's never entirely lost the sobering sense of awe it brought.

It's also why, when he and Hermione separated, he never feared that it would mean separation from the kids too. It's why they're still a part of his everyday life even now, and not just an obligatory hour-long firecall once a week.

Ron watches the snowflakes accumulate on the windshield and get wiped away, and he listens attentively while Rose tells a long and enthusiastic story about how Olivia helped make up the posters when the neighbours' cat wandered off, only to find the silly thing hiding in their own garage.

He reflects on the fact that being a parent is both the hardest thing in the world, and yet somehow also the dead simplest.

3.

Harry's boots crunch in the freshly fallen snow. He could have Apparated right to the front door, but the sciatic sting down the back of his leg reminds him that he needs the exercise, so he trudges across the field, breaking a path through the smooth, white sheet of it.

He isn't the only one who's been here since the snow fell. The delicate blue-shadowed dents of a deer's hoofprints lead out of the woods to a spot where the snow has been dug down to the crumpled brown grasses that lie below, making good forage for those willing to persist at it. Harry's seen them here before—startled by his presence, with ears pricked up and elegant noses covered in snow. None are here now, though; when he pauses to look for them, the muffled winter silence is broken only by the distant croaking of a raven.

Moving on, breathing in the chill air, taking step after step, Harry's mind turns to his parents. It's an aching thought, even now, but not the same as when he was young. Back then, his grief was mostly for himself, for all that had been stolen from him. He had to grow much older than that before he understood a grief of another kind: the sombre knowledge of how cruelly short twenty-one years actually are.

The longer he's lived past that age, the more years and decades he's seen that they never did, the better he's understood this. It's been like leaving them behind at a train station, watching them recede further and further into the distance, looking ever smaller, ever younger. And now that Harry's own children are well past that age, now that even his grandchildren are getting close...

Now when he thinks of James and Lily, he doesn't see himself reaching out tiny hands for a parental embrace. Instead he yearns to take them in his own arms and comfort them. To protect them like the children he now understands that they were.

The snow in the middle of the field is deeper than he thought; Harry sinks in up to his shins. As he presses onward, he breathes the most recent of billions of breaths, he takes the most recent of billions of steps. He thinks of how long it's been since his father felt damp breath fogging up his glasses from beneath a scarf, and how long it's been since his mother felt her toes going numb inside heavy winter boots. They felt those things once, just as present and earthly as everyone alive today. They knew those feelings only for the blink of a cosmic eye, and then they knew no more.

At last, Harry makes it across the field, out of the deep snow, and emerges onto the shovelled path that leads up to the cabin. So much easier to walk here that it's like suddenly treading on clouds.

He opens the door. He comes in out of the grey, dimming winter afternoon, and into the bright warmth. Into a new world of colour, into the scent of pine and fresh baking, into the smiling faces of his family—Hermione and Ron are sitting side by side on the sofa, relaxed together at last in a way they never were before—into delighted cries of _"Harry!" "Dad!" "Grandpa!"_

He shuts the door behind him and opens his arms to the little ones who run up to greet him—still on their way to their first million breaths. With any luck, they will breathe billions upon billions more, and someday they will think back on their grandfather coming in from the snow on one of those old Christmas holidays, and marvel at living to be the same age that he was then.


End file.
